For me, 2013 was the year of finally jumping on the cloud storage bandwagon. After I had my phone stolen and I forever lost pictures and videos of my son learning to walk, I immediately put the Dropbox app on my new phone so media would automatically upload to my account. I’m glad I have this enabled, but there’s still something I don’t love about all of these photos “just hanging out there.” Cloud storage is great, it’s private and secure, but for me it’s a hassle to keep organized and I reached my storage capacity pretty quickly.

And that’s a problem we also ran into in our household—media storage. My husband is a photographer who shoots exclusively in RAW format, and between the two of us taking pictures, the gigs add up quickly on our laptops. So we invested in our own private cloud, WD’s My Cloud. Here’s what I love about it:

Local Security. Chances are pretty low that your data would be lost with a service like Google, Dropbox, or Amazon, but I like the idea of having complete control over our cloud storage. My Cloud is easy to set up and uploading and downloading to the drive seems to be a lot quicker than using a public cloud service.

Access. My Cloud works like any other hard drive on my network, but I can also access it on any device with an Internet connection. We’ve even mapped the drive to our PlayStaytion 3 so we can play movies without worrying about taking up space on the PS3 or our laptops.

Price. Our 3 terabyte unit goes for $179 (also available in 2 or 4 TB). If you’ve looked into yearly prices on Amazon or Dropbox for this amount of storage, it would be $2,800 or more. Oh dear.

Features. You can create password-protected user accounts so others can access your cloud, run full backups on a computer, or directly upload photos from your camera via the USB 3.0 port. More features here.

We’ve only had My Cloud for about a month, but already I’m so glad we’re using this. If you’re looking for more (and affordable) storage for your home or parish, I’d highly recommend this as a great option.